A Murder, A Bit of Shakespeare, And Some Very Bad Grammar

My friend Shelly was guilty of murder. Not of any person, but worse; she was guilty of murdering the English language. Every time she opened her mouth to speak, you could practically hear the language screech in terror as she ground it into dust under her heel. She had the vocabulary of a bumbling toddler, the accent of an extraterrestrial, and the grammatical abilities of someone who doesn’t know English. To make matters worse, she gushed along at the speed of an express train, eating every second letter. Let’s just say it wasn’t easy talking to her.Take the day we got our English results. She came up to me, her face flushed red with anger, and began to blabber, “Would you believe it no you wouldn’t that jerk! She tells me that! Who does she think she is she thinks she’s too great. She’s so so so.... I need a really strong word.... not nice. Yeah! That’s it she’s not nice!”

My mind had been spinning around in circles ever since she had started talking, and now it was dizzy. After I had regained my mental balance, I just asked, “Who?” So she looked like me like I was the crazy one and shrieked, “Who else do you think it was her. That... stupid teacher who doesn’t like me and hates me. She made me fail and wrote in this red colour ink all over my paper. That I don’t know what is grammar... of course I do she’s just mean so now I don’t like her also.”

I cringed. Shakespeare must have been reeling in his grave.

Our city’s newly elected mayor is an English major, and a pretty dedicated one that. She has started a new police patrol here, the Grammar Police. They’re called GP for short. They have full authority to fine you for the wrong use of a comma or lug you to jail for wrong sentence formation. By some huge coincidence (or intervention by Shakespeare’s spirit), three GPs happened to be eavesdropping on our conversation. Shelly’s cold blooded murder of the English language left them frozen in their tracks. One promptly fainted, the second tried in vain to revive him and the third rushed to arrest Shelly.

I felt awful, thinking I would never see Shelly again, but Shakespeare must have heaved a sigh of relief and gone back to resting in peace.

Shelly was taken to court and charged with the murder of a language. She pleaded innocent, but hardly had she opened her mouth to do so, the judge pronounced her guilty. Being a minor, she was let off after a month. She hadn’t been let off so lightly though, because she had been subjected to rigorous imprisonment. Ten hours of grammar practice a day...plus five more of vocabulary.

At the end of the month she returned to school and now it was my turn to heave a sigh of relief, because despite the noise pollution she caused every time she tried to speak, she was my friend. So I was basically jumping up and down like a maniac, but she came up to me and said smoothly, “I do wish you a good morning; I trust you are in exceptional health and frame of mind these days.” “It’s so great to have you back!” I shrieked, still bouncing about like a drunken kangaroo. Then her words registered in my brain and I stopped short. “Wait... WHAT did you just say?”

She looked confused as to why I was still unable to understand her. “I was merely inquiring in a broad-spectrum manner as to how you have been faring in the duration I was at the penal complex, as it truly is a profound, immeasurable pleasure to interact with you once again.”

“Ummm... you speak differently,” I stammered. She nodded and explained, “Indeed I do. During my absence I was made conscious of the grave error in my conduct toward our language. The instructors there kindly removed these scandalous inaccuracies from my speech; I owe them more than my gratitude can supply.”

I resigned myself to carrying around both a thesaurus and a dictionary so that I could speak to her. Shakespeare’s corpse must have turned green with envy.

After our next exam, she was in tears. Strange, since she was now the obvious candidate to top our class, as long as our teacher understood a word she wrote. I thought maybe she was so upset because she missed a comma. Turned out she had barely finished a quarter of her essay. “The examination sheet requested five hundred words.” she wailed, “I was writing on antidisestablishmentarianism, and I only had time to inscribe approximately a hundred!”